That Wasn't So Bad.

There had been two scripting problems that I needed to address, and I have been dragging my feet at addressing them because I knew that both would require an investment of time and debugging.  I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I was wrong on both cases, but for different reasons.

The first problem was the larger problem of the two: getting monsters to not pull NPCs.  Some monsters pull other monsters as well as players, and I was annoyed to learn that these monsters are just as happy to pull NPCs.  This is a feature – not a bug – for the design belief is that NPCs are people too.  I am in full support for equal pulling rights for NPCs, but there are some cases where my carefully placed NPCs need to stay in their carefully placed locations.  Tempering a monster's yanking urges would require a way for the NPC to opt-out from the pull.  I spent more time thinking about the implementation of this opt-out concept than I did writing the code, and as a result I experienced little in the way of bugs and frustration.

The second problem involved my silly Parting Words script: I discovered that NPCs would continue to speak their parting words to a player long after that player had left the area.  The fix for this was both short in time and short in code.

By the end of this evening, I had faced both tasks that I had been dreading and learned that there had been nothing to dread.  One change went smoothly due to a lot of planning, and the other went smoothly because the fix was smaller than I had imagined.

There must be an adage that summarizes this experience.